by Sam Smith
Jordan was the greatest scorer in the game. But could he win? The Bulls knew that the public notion that their offense relied less and less on Jordan this season was not quite correct. Jordan still dominated the offense; his percentage of the offense was the same as it had been the last two seasons, including in Doug Collins’s last as coach, when he was accused of catering too much to Jordan. Jordan’s shots per game were about the same; his scoring total was down to 31.5 per game only because he was attempting fewer free throws. The Bulls had concluded the season with just three players averaging in double figures, and no team in modern NBA history had won a title with so few; only the 1957–58 Hawks, the 1974–75 Warriors, and the 1982–83 76ers had won titles with just four players averaging in double figures during the season.
Jackson publicly protested that if Jordan scoring was what it took to win, then so be it. The aim was to win. But it was Jackson who tried desperately before the season to make Jordan realize that only once had a team won a title with the league’s leading scorer. He knew the feeling around the league was that Jordan would have to adjust once his supporting cast improved. It had this season with the development of Pippen and Grant.
Walt Frazier, now a Knicks broadcaster, had wondered about Jordan in his autobiography a few years earlier: “He’s a terrific player who can do everything, but I wonder as his teams get better and better if he’ll be able to adjust to playing a smaller role and scoring less. Will he be just as happy when he’s scoring 25 instead of 35? How will he react when he’s taking only 20 shots a game instead of 30?”
Jackson knew what Frazier was talking about. But Jordan had not gone down to 25 points, nor had he substantially cut his number of shots. Jackson had thought he could vary the offense by making the Bulls a running team that would score more points; then Jordan could score his 30-plus and others would increase their scoring. But the increase was only marginal and was mostly gobbled up by Pippen.
The questions that were there at the start of the season hadn’t gone away. Only the playoffs would provide an answer.
June Jackson, Phil’s wife of almost twenty years, couldn’t recall Phil being this confident before a playoff game. But Jackson knew that the Bulls had the overall matchup advantage against the Knicks; Bill Cartwright played Patrick Ewing well and the Bulls had the advantage at almost every other position. Jackson felt good, even if it didn’t stop the nightmares. For there were still the games to be played and sometimes they could be as hard to predict as honest dice.
“Should I play Hopson?” Jackson thought. “Can Levingston play? Is he big enough? And what about King? Should I forget about him and go with Scott Williams and we’ll worry about King this summer? Horace has to have some help from somebody. Bill seems to be slowing down a little. He doesn’t seem to be moving like he was a few weeks ago.”
Horace Grant wasn’t aware of what Jackson was thinking, but he was a little annoyed about the practice session, about ninety minutes of films and then almost a two-hour practice.
“More than an hour of film,” he said. “And then running like this. We know this team [the Knicks]. Coaches get crazy this time of year. It happens to all of them, even the good ones, like Phil.” Later, Grant would be told that Del Harris in Milwaukee had put his team through a combined six-hour film-and-practice session during the Bucks’ opening-round three-game loss to the 76ers. “See, see, just what I told you,” Grant would say. “The playoffs make them crazy.”
Jackson’s first impulses were correct. The Knicks were no match for the Bulls and wouldn’t be. They were a team in turmoil, about to lose their fifth coach in five years (John MacLeod would leave to become coach at Notre Dame, a job he interviewed for in Chicago between Games 1 and 2 of the series). They were, undoubtedly, the most mismanaged team in the NBA. All around, the players talked about changes. “I guess I’m gone,” Charles Oakley told a friend before Game 1. “This whole thing is a mess. The guys here don’t like one another and everyone’s pointing fingers and they worry about what’s in the papers and let it bother them. It’s a mess.”
Like that first game. The Knicks would hang in for eleven minutes as they slowed the pace, worked the ball around, and hit a few open jumpers. But Jordan made a steal and hit a three-pointer with ten seconds left in the first quarter and then B.J. Armstrong made a steal and hit another three; suddenly, after trailing by 1 point with two minutes to go, the Knicks were down 10 after one quarter. Jackson knew the psychological impact this had on a team. “They think they’ve played a great quarter, done everything the coaches wanted them to do, and they’re still behind by ten,” he sympathized. The Bulls then sprang their defensive trap and the Knicks fell right into it, piling up turnovers as if they were running a bakery. New York fell behind by 23 points six minutes into the second quarter and trailed by a whopping 65–36 by halftime. The game was over. They would go on to lose 126–85.
The Knicks pounded away in Game 2, slowing the game, taking better care of the ball, and getting Patrick Ewing, who scored just 6 points on 7 shots in Game 1, involved; he had 11 shots and 14 points in the first quarter, even if he would go on to miss 10 of 11 shots thereafter. It would be the Knicks’ best chance in the series. Jackson called his team into a time-out in the third quarter and shouted, “Do you guys want to win this game? No matter what we try, it’s not working.” The Knicks hung tight and the score was tied with eight minutes left, but the Knicks’ energy was gone and they let go. They would be held to 4 points in the next five minutes as the Bulls pulled away to an 89–79 victory and a sweep of their two home games, thus all but guaranteeing a first-round victory. Publicly, the Bulls were saying things about how the Knicks came back from 0–2 the previous year to defeat the Celtics in the opening round, but they doubted it was possible. And, frankly, so did the Knicks. They seemed beaten mentally and physically. Rookie Jerrod Mustaf had gotten his nose broken, and Mark Jackson was wearing a bandage over a seven-stitch cut. He said Cartwright had bitten him.
But there was trouble in the Bulls camp as they prepared to head to New York for Game 3. The trouble was coming from the Bulls’ wives. They wanted to go to New York and they were angry. Jackson had issued an edict: The wives wouldn’t travel until the Finals, if the team got that far. And several were furious. “I don’t care who Phil Jackson thinks he is,” said Donna Grant. “He can’t stop me from going to New York.” In the end, she wouldn’t go. But she would require some soothing from Jackson’s wife, June.
June Jackson had raised four kids and had participated in almost a dozen moves with Phil over the years, but life at last seemed to be settling down. She’s an energetic, petite brunette with a small, turned-up nose and dancing eyes who looks ten years younger than she is. She had met Phil back in New York after Jackson’s first marriage dissolved. She’d been committed to raising a family, and now that her kids were growing, she went back to school, working on her master’s in social work. In many ways, she helped Jackson maintain his sixties consciousness; she often wondered how they could be making so much money. Jackson would sardonically tell her to call him to discuss it from her car phone.
But she remained a devoted basketball fan and had inherited the distaff-side problems. She planned a meeting with the wives. It was time, she said, to support the men. No arguments, no pettiness. Let’s not create problems about going to New York, she said.
It was an attitude recently expounded by 76ers’ forward Rick Mahorn. “You’ve got to let your family sit back this time of year and let you play basketball,” Mahorn explained. “It’s no time for the little nitpicking things, for, ‘Oh, honey, you’ve got to cut the grass or pick up so-and-so.’ Nothing against your family, but this is when you have to be selfish and when the summer comes and you’re champions people will be saying, ‘There’s so-and-so’s wife. She’s a champion.’ We’re champions, they’re champions. Everyone’s a champion. That’s when you reap the benefits.”
The wives watched Game 3 on TV.
The Bulls could see the end coming quickly. Game 3 was set for Tuesday, April 30, in New York. Game 4, if necessary, would be Thursday. Jordan scheduled a tee time back in Chicago for Thursday morning.
“How are you feeling?” someone asked Jordan after Game 2.
“I’m fine as long as the weather stays nice,” he answered.
Translation: golf weather.
Cartwright decided to pack for just one night.
“They’re a team without emotion,” Bach told Jackson. “They’ve got no soul, no anger, no hatred. They just seem dead. It’s funny, but only Mark Jackson seemed to have that, but he’s not doing anything. You get the right coach in there, and I think Pat Riley would be a huge success, and they could do some things. But now they can’t seem to come together.”
The Knicks had one last cartridge left and they squeezed it off in the first quarter, taking a 31–25 lead behind 11 points from Gerald Wilkins. The Knicks went ahead by 12 midway through the second quarter, but the Bulls sent a calling card that would ultimately signal the end of the series. First, Pippen came down the lane and rose and slammed over Ewing, and then Jordan, deking and wriggling along the baseline, split two defenders and also powered over Ewing, almost throwing himself through the basket with the ball. The Bulls had made their point: They had attacked Ewing and he had retreated, a beaten man who symbolized the fate of his team. The Knicks were backing off from the challenge. The Knicks led by a point at halftime, but the game was already decided, an eventual 103–94 Bulls win. By the end of the third quarter, the Bulls were ahead by 12 points and were watching the scoreboard for Philadelphia’s sweep over the Bucks. They’d meet the 76ers again in the second round, just as they had last season.
There would be no celebrating. There was a long way to go and this was to be expected. It was almost like an exhibition-season version of the playoffs. It was time for the real games to begin.
When Phil Jackson left the locker room and walked into the narrow hall outside to answer reporters’ questions, he saw the Reverend Jesse Jackson. The former presidential candidate, lately a talk-show host, made a habit of showing up at such events. Reporters, cameras, action! Phil Jackson knew that the Reverend Jackson had called Bulls players in their rooms during the playoffs the last few seasons to pray with them and occasionally to suggest plays. Two years earlier, in the playoff series against New York, he’d started giving interviews about game strategy. He’d try to jockey close to the bench before games and get into the locker room and say a prayer with Jordan. Jordan confided to friends that he never quite knew what to make of Jackson; he was fearful of offending him because of Reverend Jackson’s clout in the black community, but he was wary of the reverend’s motives. Phil Jackson had stopped all of that, and this year the Reverend Jackson would be getting no free publicity from Phil Jackson’s team.
“Only accredited media in the locker room, and that includes you, Jesse Jackson,” Phil Jackson shouted in the tight corridor off the Madison Square Garden floor as he walked out of the locker room.
The Reverend Jackson looked hard at the coach and then away, as if no one had heard. Next to the Reverend Jackson stood filmmaker Spike Lee, who’d done Nike commercials with Jordan. He had started to hang around with the players, and Grant and Pippen were wearing T-shirts that read, “Give Us Our 40 Acres and a Mule,” a reference to the promise made to freed slaves, and also to the name of Lee’s production company. Lee, too, was waiting to get into the Bulls’ locker room. Jackson looked at Lee. Lee started to back away, as if saying, “If he ain’t letting Jesse Jackson in, no way I’m gettin’ in.” The Reverend Jackson left unobtrusively, but a few days later he would show up in Chicago at the opening game of the series with the 76ers. After Game 1, he would be seen sitting next to Charles Barkley and whispering in Barkley’s ear while dozens of reporters tried to get at Barkley for postgame comments.
5/4 v. Philadelphia; 5/6 v. Philadelphia; 5/10 at Philadelphia; 5/12 at Philadelphia; 5/14 v. Philadelphia*; 5/17 at Philadelphia*; 5/19 v. Philadelphia*
*lf necessary.
The Bulls were more worried about the 76ers than the Knicks, particularly because of Charles Barkley and Philadelphia’s physical upfront play. Jackson had felt the team would need mental toughness for this series, and had taken a quote he said he found from Thomas Jefferson to lead into the scouting report on Philadelphia: “Nothing can stop the man with the right attitude from achieving his goal,” Jackson wrote, “but nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong attitude.” But there also was the question of the 76ers’ unpredictability, which Jefferson did not address. “The players call ’em ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’” Jackson noted. “Jimmy Lynam [the 76ers coach] has done a great job with that bunch, not only because of injuries, but because you never know what’s going to happen with those guys.”
So Jackson wasn’t surprised when, early in the opening game, 76ers’ center Manute Bol, the seven-foot-seven-inch African tribesman, started screaming at him. “Zone, zone,” Jackson started yelling as Bol stood near the free-throw line on defense. Jackson had complained going into the series that the referees allowed Bol to play in a zone without guarding his man, and he was going to point this out.
“Mother fuck, mother fuck, mother fuck,” Bol shouted at Jackson in a sort of soprano hyena form of broken English. “Why you pick on me, you mother fuck?”
Jackson could only laugh.
But there were other reasons to laugh, for Jackson’s five, as the Bulls management liked to advertise the team, was having itself a laugher over the 76ers. Barkley was magnificent, virtually unstoppable, as he bulled past Bulls to the basket—he scored 34 points and had 11 rebounds—but the other four 76ers’ starters combined for 17 points in a performance the Bulls players recognized only too well.
“It was a total reversal of what we used to be,” Jordan agreed afterward. “I’m familiar with that, because you want to be a competitor and try to carry the load. But sometimes you’ll come up short. If Charles continues to score almost half their points, we’ll win. You’re bound to get tired when you have to score and rebound and play defense. I know. I’ve been there. Our main focus was to contain Barkley, let him have his points, and shut down the other guys.”
It seemed to his teammates that Jordan was finally beginning to understand. He scored 29 points in the game as the Bulls took a 20-point lead in the first quarter and never allowed the 76ers to bring the deficit under double figures. The Bulls’ smothering team defense limited Armon Gilliam to 2-of-10 shooting as Grant drove him away from the basket, while Pippen closed down Ron Anderson in a tummy-to-tummy bump session that held him to 3-of-ll shooting; by the end of the game it seemed as if Anderson had “Bulls” written backward on his chest. Jordan’s man, Hersey Hawkins, could do little in a 2-for-9 shooting effort; Jordan was so wrapped up in his defense that when he came out at the start of the second quarter, he demanded of Jackson as Craig Hodges took his place, “I’ve stopped him. Now don’t let somebody else get on him and let him get off!” Jordan would be back in the game four minutes later after Hawkins got free for a three-pointer, and the 76ers’ All-Star guard from Chicago wouldn’t score the rest of the quarter.
But perhaps more than anything, one Jordan play call signaled the apparent change in Jordan’s attitude. “Five-three, five-three,” Jordan hollered as he stood near the top of the floor, dribbling the ball.
“Five-three?” Bill Cartwright thought to himself. Jordan had never called that play before. It was a screen play for Pippen with Cartwright blocking out Manute Bol. Pippen had the advantage because of Bol’s lack of lateral quickness, but Jordan rarely called plays for others, especially when he had the ball on the top of the floor. He’d either dump off the ball and step back, or take it up the middle, trying to score and then fanning the ball out on the wing or inside when the defense collapsed.
Cartwright nodded to himself and smiled. And Pippen scored.
Jordan would end the game wi
th just 15 shots, 1 fewer than Pippen.
Cartwright and the others didn’t know about a conversation Jackson and Jordan had had as the playoffs were getting started. Jackson wanted to talk with Jordan about the postseason. And Jordan said that since his history was to come out smoking offensively—he held the scoring records for three- and five-game opening-round series—he’d hold off. “I’m going to lay in the weeds because they’ll be expecting me not to,” Jordan told Jackson.
This was just what Jackson wanted to hear. That it came from Jordan only made it better. The Bulls would have their best chance if Jordan played that way and then pounced when it was his time, in the last five minutes of games. Jackson especially knew that Philadelphia would be looking for an explosion from Jordan because of the way he’d scored against the 76ers in the 1990 playoffs, averaging 43 points and more than 30 shots per game in the Bulls’ 4–1 victory. The 76ers hadn’t played much double-team on Jordan then, but they’d certainly watch him more closely this year. That would make his passing off all the more effective.
The Bulls were already beginning to look ahead after their 105–92 opening-game win over the 76ers. Jordan had watched the Trail Blazers, considered to be the best team in the Western Conference, and he wasn’t impressed, even though they’d beaten the Bulls twice in the regular season.
“They play stupid,” he was saying in the locker room before Game 2. “They take all kinds of stupid shots and then think they can get every rebound. I thought [Danny] Ainge would make them smarter, but he hasn’t helped in that way that much, I guess.”
